The mother of all insults

The suggestion that Marco Materazzi might have insulted Zinédine Zidane's mother during the World Cup final seems justification enough for the head-butt that followed. But why is it that the worst insults in the world are always about your mum? Stuart Jeffries reports

It was seven minutes before half time. Real Madrid were 2-0 down against already relegated opponents in May 2004, when David Beckham tackled Real Murcia's Luis Garcia. The England captain thought the tackle was clean but the linesman flagged for a foul. Leaping to his feet, the Dagenham-born galáctico unleashed a volley of idiomatic Spanish, calling the official a "hijo de puta" (son of a whore). The referee, Turienzo Alvarez, had no hesitation in producing a red card. But was that the right decision? After all, Beckham's Spanish had been so risible in press conferences hitherto that this sure-footed demonstration of his grasp of Hispanic rudery surely should have won him a round of applause.

Beyond questions of Beckham's linguistic (in)competence, though, there were cultural differences at issue. After the match, Beckham (reverting to English) told reporters: "I didn't realise what I had said was that bad. I had heard a few of my team-mates say the same before me." This is a bravura defence: in Britain, to call someone a son of a bitch or to deploy any derogatory barb that focuses on impugning the sexual integrity of the target's mother is hardly the worst thing one can say. If he had abused a fourth official at Goodison Park in an Everton-Man Utd game in the same terms, the linesman would not have got the hump; nor would the referee have seen red quite so readily. In Spain, it is different.

The Sun even drew up a list of mother insults that Beckham could deploy if he sought an early bath on future occasions. They included the rather infantile Tu madre tiene un bigote (Your mother has a moustache) and the frankly laborious Anda la puta que te pari (Go back to the prostitute who gave birth to you), but not the one that would surely have got him lynched in the Bernabeu, namely Me cago en la leche que mamaste (I shit in the milk that you suckled from your mother's breast). The Times concocted a letter of apology that Beckham might send to the linesman: Dear Assistant Referee, (Ayudante Arbitro) I am sorry that I called you a son of a whore. (Lo siento que se llamo hijo de puta .) I am sure that your mother is not a whore at all. (Estoy seguro que su madre no es una puta.) I am sure that your mother is, in fact, a respected figure within her community. (Estoy seguro que su madre es una mujer muy respetable en su comunidad.)" And so on. But neither helped him become as fluent in Spanish as his fellow English team-mate Jonathan Woodgate had become. In September 2005, he got into a rumble in the tunnel with an Espanyol player after calling him a "hijo de puta", which suggests his Spanish had developed as fast as the British press had hoped.

Beckham was pleading ignorance, not of Spanish, but of a Latin culture that would venerate motherhood so highly as to take particular offence at a misogynistic insult about the target's mother. Or so the argument goes. In some cultures if one man spoke ill of another's mother it would fully warrant him getting a face full of bald Frenchman's bonce - or worse. In Britain, such an insult would not be quite so offensive. Such cultural differences, one might well think, come from the fact that Britain got rid of any traces of mariolatry - the worship of the virgin mother of Christ - during the Reformation; only Catholic countries like those of southern Europe are encumbered with such mother worship. Hence, perhaps, the seeming sentimentalism of the mother fixation in Pedro Almodóvar's films All About My Mother and What Have I Done To Deserve This. Hence too Y Tu Mamá También, the Mexican film whose title (And Your Mother Too) sounds like the end of a vulgar insult that reflexively embroils the target's mother.

"There are certainly cultural differences in swearing," says feminist socio-linguist Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford. "In Scandinavia, the taboo words are to do with the devil. Here [Britain] they're fuck or cunt. In Mediterranean cultures it has to do with the classic relationship that exists between a son and his mother. Italians, for example, adore their mothers. One's trespassing on a sacred relationship if one insults a man's mother." (Incidentally, the devil taboo does not mean that mother insults are unknown in Scandinavian countries: in Finland, for example, there is an expression "Äitisi nai poroja!" which means "Your mother copulates with reindeer!" Sweet!)

Thus, if indeed Marco Materazzi did impugn Zinédine Zidane's mother as a prostitute or a terrorist or perhaps both (busy woman!) in Sunday's World Cup Final debacle that concluded with Zizou head-butting the Italian's chest, an ancient ritual was being played out. An Italian might well have reflex recourse to such an anti-motherly jibe, particularly when he was embroiled in the shirt-pulling petulance that overtook leading exponents of the beautiful game in the last minutes of extra time in the most important football match in four years. "It's quite important to realise that this is a ritual," says Cameron. "To say something outrageous in this way is part of a provocative ritual rather than reality. If your mother was indeed a sex worker, the insult would be very different and less potent."

The cultural differences in swearing that Cameron mentions are a little baffling. In Britain, the C-word is still potent - a taboo for many comics who otherwise specialise in transgression. The Spanish equivalent, coño, is not so offensive; indeed, its very ubiquity may well explain its lack of power to shock: it has become a relatively mild insult or at least as banal a swear word as betokening the speaker's lack of imagination. Paradoxically, in Britain we find the c-word offensive but not the disparagement of the sexual integrity of one's mother.

But are the British so immune to the rhetorical power of mother insults as we might like to think? One could easily overstate that possibility. There is, after all, a rude song by Goldie Lookin' chain called Your Mother's got a Penis. And back in the early 90s, Rob Newman and David Baddiel did a comic turn as two crusty old history professors that culminated with one saying something disparaging about the other's mother. The routine usually went like this. Baddiel's professor would introduce an abstruse historical theme for debate. Then the argument quickly degenerated into insult, and the insults would be funny because both professors would continue to speak in the formal voices of intellectual debate. "You see that piece of snot on my handkerchief," one emeritus professor would say to the other, "that's you, that is." "You see him?" the other would retort, pointing at the picture of a particularly disgusting man. "That's the man who works in your pants, that is." But the coup de grace in the escalating exchange of insults would be the following. "You see X [where X is a variable invariably denoting something foul]? That's your mum, that is." The sketch supplied a catchphrase that, for a while, was every bit as popular in playgrounds as those offered in the Fast Show. "You see that?" children would ask each other at playtime. "That's your mum, that is."

Even though Britain has been relatively immune to putatively Catholic-inspired mother insults, it has imported a great deal of the rich vernacular and idioms of African-American culture. And this means that some elements of British society like insulting a rival's mother in the way that Materazzi may have done Zidane's. In the US they say "yo mamma"; in Britain, we took that phrase and now say - or rather wannabe hip-hop badasses say - "your mum".

Right now there is a show on MTV called Yo Momma, popular in the US and the UK, that co-opts the ghetto insult face-off known as "the dozens" and turns it into what some critics have called "a fun parlour game" in which challengers attempt to best each other by coming up with the most outlandish insults for each other's mothers. It's not quite I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, but still. Here are a few insults from the show to give you the idea: "Yo momma so ugly her mum had to be drunk to breastfeed her", "Yo momma so fat, she's on both sides of the family", "Yo momma so stinky she uses Right Guard and Left Guard". You get the idea. It's a televised ritual that is sanitised to the extent that it cannot escalate into violence (as such exchanges reportedly do on occasion in real life), still less the decisive dispute-ending measure of busting a cap.

There are many other examples from African-American culture: the Pharcyde had a song called Yo Mama, which featured the charming lyric, "The sad fact is (what?) ya mama smokes crack (what?)/She got a burning yearning and there's no turning back/ Her knuckles drag down to the ground when she walk /Spit comes out that bitch mouth when she talk." In 2004, the Wayans Brothers released The Dozens, a "yo momma" game for mobile phones. And the movies White Men Can't Jump, 8 Mile and House Party have capitalised on this. White Men Can't Jump includes the purported insult: "Your mother's an astronaut", though perhaps readers might like to explain why that should be a put-down.

But why are the verbal contests in African-American culture that feature disparaging competitors' mothers called "the dozens"? In Still Laughing to Keep from Crying: Black Humor, Mona Lisa Saloy, professor of English at Dillard University, explains: "The dozens has its origins in the slave trade of New Orleans where deformed slaves - generally slaves punished with dismemberment for disobedience - were grouped in lots of a 'cheap dozen' for sale to slave owners. For a black to be sold as part of the 'dozens' was the lowest blow possible."

And today the lowest blow of all is to insult somebody's mother. Is it just a phenomenon popular in Christian or post-Christian cultures? By no means. In Mandarin Chinese, one of the worst insults is Nide muchin shr ega da wukwei (Your mother is a big turtle). It is thought to be particularly insulting to call someone a turtle egg because a turtle does not know its father and turtles are promiscuous. And the disparagement of a rival's mother is a global rhetorical tactic: even in Britain, where one might think such rhetoric lacks force, such terms of abuse as "bastard" (implying that a mother is necessary, but the lack of a known father is shameful) or "son of a bitch" (impugning the rival's mother's sexual integrity) still imply sexist contempt for mothers, even if Britons do not find such terms especially insulting.

Are such insults founded in misogyny, I ask Cameron, author of Language and Sexual Politics and Feminism and Linguistic Theory? "Of course they're misogynistic. Not just overtly. If you think about those 'yo momma' remarks that they use in playing the dozens, they're subtly misogynistic in the way they systematically erase the mother. She isn't even present when the insult takes place. She's not even important enough to be the subject of the insult." But isn't her honour being defended when men leap to the defence of their insulted mother? Some sardonic tittering comes down the phone line from Oxford by way of reply.

Why would insulting a boy's mother be so very terrible? A quick flick through some of the great works of psychoanalysis will tell you why. Freud thought the male child had an unconscious desire for the exclusive love of his mother. Anyone who interfered with that hoped-for exclusivity (such as her husband) must die. Such is the Oedipus complex, provoking a neurotic desire that includes jealousy towards the father and the unconscious wish for his death.

But the Oedipus complex, one might well think, has another dimension. What else could tarnish that unconscious desire for the exclusive love of one's mother? The answer seems to be the suggestion, couched in an insult, that your mother is sexually promiscuous. How could a mummy-obsessed boy tolerate the thought that she might have sex with someone other than him? Hence the potency of the insult and the fact that, even if Materazzi did not call Zidane's mother a prostitute, the possibility of such a grave insult might well justify to many people (probably mostly men) a physical assault on a person who had made that psychically intolerable jibe. It is, at least, a theory. True, there is also such a phenomenon as the Electra complex among girls, but there is not yet a parallel for father-besotted daughters head-butting people who speak ill of their dads. Maybe in time there will be.

Why aren't fathers the butt of insults so much as mothers? Had David Beckham said to the linesman "Tu padre es un gigolo que tiene cópula con una multiplicidad de diversos socios" (Your father is a gigolo who has intercourse with a multitude of different partners), he probably wouldn't have got a red card. Just a baffled look, and applause from those impressed by his command of his second language. "The underlying idea is you're attacking what your rival came out of," says Cameron. "That's why it's mothers rather than fathers who feature in the more potent insult. Everybody comes from their mother".